Chapter Forty-One

His son looked itchy. Edwin could spot that itchiness anywhere. He looked the way Edwin used to feel, coming home to Dolores after a night spent in another woman’s bed. But eventually that feeling numbed with time, so there was only a faint sting whenever he left Dolores for the comfort of someone who didn’t compare him to Jesus or his brother.

But his son knew no numbness. It was apparent in how he yelled in his sleep or looked all shifty-eyed standing in his boxers and tube socks like he didn’t know how he had gotten from the kitchen to the living room and was concerned some sort of conspiracy was behind it. Edwin knew his heart was troubled, but he wasn’t sure his son knew that himself. And Edwin was scared to question him about it because he already knew it had something to do with his nephew, Travis.

Travis was a good boy, which was par for the course. Made sense such a good man like Franklin would have such a good grandson. Edwin always tried to scrub the bitterness off his skin because it never felt right, but that dang stuff was resilient. He hated how Franklin could just send up a prayer to his God and everything turned out like roses.

But then he remembered Anette and Jamal. And then Edwin would set to scrubbing again.

Maybe Douglas felt that way about Travis. Maybe there was no winning whether Travis was walking the streets a free man or sitting in juvie. Maybe Douglas spent his nights scrubbing because there was something in Travis he wanted just like Edwin saw in his own brother. Goodness. And Edwin was ashamed that this was something he just couldn’t offer his son.

He needed to talk to someone about it. He made the mistake of talking to his wife.

“You notice something wrong with Douglas?” He asked after a few too many cold ones. The smoke from his cigar was a soft snake in the night. He had lured her out with a few cat calls through the sliding glass doors after his boys had gone home. He could still charm the ladies, even the ladies who wished he were dead.

So now she sat next to him in one of their rusted-out metal chairs on the small piece of pavement that moonlit as a back porch. She was the type of old his mother used to be. There was a sense of awe there, of respect for what her body and her mind had gone through. But Edwin knew himself, knew there was also a slight repugnance that drove him into the arms of other women.

You drove yourself there. Edwin froze. He wanted to ask, “Who’s there?” because he knew Dolores didn’t say it. But he was sharp enough to not act like a crazy person.

“So why have you proposed this meeting?” Dolores asked. She sipped on one of his tall boys, a sight that was duplicitous set against her pious TV watching. But Edwin knew his wife. He knew she tried on identities like clothes and was apt to switch if something nicer came along. She enjoyed her drink with full lips and a breakaway stare that he often felt guilty of. He knew that look, like there was something else you were supposed to be doing, you just couldn’t remember what.

“It’s the boy.” They both knew that was inaccurate. Douglas was no longer a boy. He was a full-grown man. Sure, he wasn’t quite twenty-one yet, but he strutted around like what he thought a man was, and it was almost a heart break moment for Edwin to realize why he got the definition so wrong.

“What about him? The terrors thing? Oh, he be fine. I be praying to the Lawd about it.” The way she said “Lord” made Edwin swish his drink hard through his teeth. It didn’t fit her well, like a belt that was a bit too tight.

“And what did the Lawd say?” he lobbed right back at her. She gave him her bug eye but sipped another drink.

“He said you going right to hell if you keep up that smart mouth of yours.”

Edwin chuckled. “But really.”

“He’s gonna be okay, Edwin. Things always okay.” Edwin refrained from telling her how wrong she was. He knew she could feel it, how very not okay they’d been for such a long, long time. But not even he could put it into words.

He supposed it had started with marrying a girl so unlike his mother. When he had met Dolores, she was a smiley counter girl at Cohns, spraying white women with perfume. At the end of the day, she smelled like a bouquet and had a figure that stood up against the ice cream sodas he bought her with the money he won off his friends. But things changed, and now Dolores hardly ever went out, and the spread in her hips was no match for the bowls of Yarnell’s she made herself when stationed in front of their TV set. She hadn’t been a bad mom though. At least she had been there, looking Douglas in his face when he learned his ABCs and used the toilet for the first time. She wasn’t a glimpse of herself walking out the door, a stray shoulder as the rest of her walked out into the night and into somebody else’s arms.

Not like you, Edwin. You’re selfish.

That voice. He had done lost his mind, as his mama would have said. But he knew he hadn’t. He knew this was the way he had always felt even when he smiled and rolled his dice and lived out the life he conducted with his own hand. He knew this was the voice that lay dormant in his chest when he crept of out of strange beds and caught the eye of women who could probably smell marriage on him but didn’t let that be a deterrent.

Who are you, Edwin?

That was the question that broke him, but he buried it deep under sternum and heart, his imaginary hands stained with his own blood as he looked at Dolores and tried to remember a time when he had felt securely inside of the man he had created for himself but couldn’t.

“Say it again, Dee.”

“It’s gonna be okay, Edwin. Always is.”

“Yeah.” Edwin stuffed that promise in his ears, his soul turning its back on the voice. “But what we do? That boy looks like he’s in pain all the time. Think he’s messed up over Travis?”

“Course he is. He’s a good boy. Loves that boy like a brother. He gets his sensitivities from me.” He tried to ignore how big his wife was next to him and how small he felt.

“Think he had something to do with it?” Edwin winced and covered it up with another swig. He hadn’t meant to ask it out loud. It was an unspoken rule between him and his wife—they both knew the truth, no need divining it up just to break their hearts.

“Edwin Barnes, I hope you playin’ with me. That boy no saint, but he would never do something like that to an old man. Travis just got messed up with those gang thugs and happened to be in our car. Douglas a good boy like that, loaning it out. And I know, Travis too young to drive, but Douglas is a softie. Remember that kitten he tried to nurse back to life in the backyard?  He’s got a good heart. He gets that from my side.”

Edwin remembered that kitten and the fullness of Douglas’s face when he stretched his arms out for his father’s approval. But all Edwin had mentioned was what a sissy Douglas looked like with that half dead cat in his hands, like he had any power of the outcome of life and death. Edwin had seen it the next day alone and at the edges of the bushes, its dead carcass surrounded by flies. That kitten haunted him—not then, when he convinced himself he had done his son a favor, but years later when life in general started to itch like a wool coat.

That white man’s face, the one he had seen in the paper flashed at him and then Douglas’s, no longer so full and willing to restore the dead to life.

“But still,” Edwin said, but his wife didn’t say anything because she was already upright and humming her way through the sliding glass door to watch her TV.